"We have a lot of new capabilities
within our Power Systems Software
portfolio like PowerVC* for cloud
management, PowerSC* for
security and PowerHA for high
availability. All of these contain
major improvements," Bührer
says. "It's really unique how many
capabilities we announced, not
only from a quantity perspective but
also from a quality perspective."
For example, the import/export
capabilities within PowerVC
enable hybrid clouds and smooth
transitions between multicloud
environments, in addition to
the ability to spin up a SANless
cloud with its software-defined
capabilities.
"Simplified security and
compliance management,
compelling malware and intrusion
prevention with PowerSC, as well
as integrating with PowerVC in
order to secure clouds right from
the beginning are now available
with PowerSC 1.1.6," Bührer says.
The PowerHA V7.2.2 UI enables
you to not only see the health of
your clusters with a single glance,
but now you can also manage your
clusters. This includes stopping
or starting a cluster, moving
resources or providing zoning on a
multitenant cloud.
From Monitoring
to Managing
PowerHA 7.2.1, which was
announced in October 2016,
allowed clients to monitor the
status of a cluster or groups
of clusters from a single view
through a GUI. This simplified the
process of determining the health
and status of the clusters. Now,
clients can manage the clusters
from this same UI.
With this release, it's possible
to add a cluster to a zone, assign
users to it and give those users
specific role-based access
authority. It's an efficient, secure
way to set up and manage the
environment, according to Finnes.
"And we have added many more
abilities as well. You can, for
example, stop all cluster services.
You can remove a cluster. You can
stop a cluster service on a node or
move a resource group, all from
the UI. You might have multiple
clusters, and you might have
multiple zones. You can zero in on
them, set them up in specific ways,
and then perform management
functions on them. Prior to
this, everything had to be done
manually using a command-line
interface or System Management
Interface Tool panels," he says.
Making cluster management
easier allows organizations to
better allocate their personnel.
Junior staffers can handle
more of the administrative
work with clusters because the
command-line interface work is
no longer required.
"You save time with
management and you're also
reducing the chance of human
error," Finnes says. "You have
a single window into the world
of your clusters. Operations are
intuitively easier. This is going to
release a certain amount of human
resources and also minimize the
dependency on people to identify
and act on issues. Even for a two-
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Organizations
can assign
different levels
of access to
the clusters for
individual
employees
node cluster, it's going to be a
time saver."
Organizations can assign
different levels of access to the
clusters for individual employees.
Some employees may be able to
only monitor them, while others
can make changes. "Consider a
cloud provider hosting banking
operations for multiple banks,"
he says. "With this UI capability,
they will be able set up individual
zones for each client complete
with secure access on shared
hardware resources. In addition,
they will be able to efficiently
monitor and more easily manage
these clusters to maintain
service-level agreements."
Finding and using the
information clients need from
error logs is also easier. "With
PowerHA 7.2.2, clients now
have a log analytics tool. Data
can be pulled in from all the
cluster nodes, AIX log, syslog
and PowerHA log. The tool will
do a correlation and analysis,
produce a report and make a
recommended fix for the problem.
For instance, a recommended
action might be to replace a
specific disk unit," he adds.
Freedom to Move
Across Clouds
Clients can deploy workload
images on their hardware of
choice or take advantage of the
cloud. "What's exciting is we're
seeing an emergence of cloud
providers that will host more
solutions, making it easy to
move AIX between public and
private clouds," Robinson says.

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